In a wide-ranging year-end interview with WTOP, Virginia Senator Mark Warner said the DC region was hardest hit by President Donald Trump’s policies.
Looking back to 2025, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said he and his office have helped tens of thousands of people across the state with individual requests, while criticizing cuts to federal agencies and the increase in law enforcement in DC.
In a wide-ranging year-end interview with WTOP, he said his office has helped with 16,000 requests, ranging from passports to lost Social Security checks.
“We had about $18 million that was rightfully put in their pockets by Virginians,” Warner said. “That was good. That doesn’t get much attention, all the file work that takes place year after year.”
Warner said his office also helped victims of Hurricane Helene in Southwest Virginia. He touted the opening of new VA hospitals in Spotsylvania and Hampton Roads, projects he said were about a decade in the making.
“It was great to see them open,” he said. “It shouldn’t have taken this long, but it’s also been a little frustrating with the government’s budget cuts to the VA that now we can’t fill the hospital with VA employees because who wants to work for the VA if you’re constantly being threatened and fired?”
Virginia is poised to become one of the first states to have full broadband coverage everywhere, including all rural areas, Warner said.
Re-election intentions
The three-term senator previously announced his plan to seek re-election next fall.
Despite newly elected Governor Abigail Spanberger’s victory in Virginia this year, Warner said, “It’s hard to predict politics these days. I’m going into next year ready to ask and advocate for Virginians to hire me one last time.”
At the national level, Warner criticized the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts to federal agencies. Federal employees and contractors lost thousands of jobs in Northern Virginia, he said, “a smart DOGE would have made sense. But this kind of ‘break things first and pick up the pieces later,’ I think has caused permanent damage to our workforce.”
Among the issues he wants to address in the future, Warner said housing and child care costs are too high and that “health care is an issue that we really need to look at in a much more comprehensive way.”
The Democratic senator has been critical of conditions at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers in Chantilly and Farmville, saying that while President Donald Trump has “rightly said that we need to fix the border, I don’t think that means masked ICE agents running around, picking up mothers as they drop children off at daycare, or picking up fathers as they go to work.”
“It’s been a very difficult year for the region, for Virginia,” Warner said. “In the region in particular, the DMV, we probably felt the greatest burden of Trump’s actions. I obviously think that given all the elections in the region, this is not what we want.”
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